


Red Children

by vayleen



Category: Sailor Moon - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Original Character POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-10-18
Updated: 2006-10-18
Packaged: 2017-12-08 19:37:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/765219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vayleen/pseuds/vayleen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mother loves her children, and her children love their Mother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red Children

“Mother loves her children, and her children love their Mother.”

It was my grandmother’s voice that echoed in my head as I stumbled in the field behind the parking lot. (Too much vodka and cigarettes and whatever else that bouncer gave me whenever it was that I entered that club.) I remembered the creamy smell of Grandmother’s hands as she took one of mine and held it against the soft earth of her garden. “Feel her heartbeat,” she whispered, eyes closed. “Feel the thrum of life.”

But unless Grandmother was holding my hand, I could feel nothing.

Grandmother and her daughter, my mother, thought little of it at first. I was The Maid, yet; the youngest of The Three and still learning the family ways, just as my mother once was before me. They both said that soon the Earth would open to me and I could feel the elements as I should. But years went by and still I felt no heart beating with mine when I touched the trees, the rocks, the soil. I felt life, to be sure, but I could not resonate with it the way Grandmother and Mother did when we sat on the rocks in the stream behind the house. After several minutes, I would give up and watch them, wishing that I could feel the power they felt.

Sometimes I would look up at the sky and feel an intense longing that burned under my skin. As I grew older, and was realizing more of what my family was trying to teach me, I knew that whatever it was in me that was awakened needed something in those stars instead of the lively planet beneath me. I didn’t understand why.

Soon my Grandmother died. With the loss of The Crone, it was my mother’s turn to ascend and I was to have a daughter of my own and become The Mother to keep the traditions of our family alive. But I could not reach the center of the Earth to ascend and so my womb would not open. On my thirtieth birthday, my mother finally gave up on me and prepared to write the final chapter in our family’s history. “You cannot ascend so it falls to me to write the end of our story,” she said when I offered to take that task on myself. “I am the true last of our line.”

The finality of her words drove us apart, even if she didn’t really mean for us to separate. The devastation of being separated from my mother so soon after my grandmother’s death broke my spirit; I abandoned Grandmother’s teachings and began to pollute my body with sedatives and drugs. The man I had handfasted with at the end of my Maidenhood, who I knew loved me with all his heart, soon disappeared from my life. I couldn’t remember if it was he who left me or the other way around, but I remembered waking one morning and noticing that he too was gone from my life.

Drugs loved me in a way Mother Earth never did.

And then that night there was the field. It was winter and I was trying to find my car, even though I was too drunk and high to drive. I was going to anyway. But I went too far and was out and away from the parking lot and in the field covered with frost. In the middle were a flock of crows fighting over discarded food. The large black birds triggered something in the back of my mind, like an old me memory trying to resurface.

I stumbled towards them but they flew away. Those that did not have beaks full of crumbs cawed at me in anger as I fell onto my knees. I kept myself from falling face-first into the dirt using my hands to brace myself up. “Stupid birds,” I thought. “I don’t even know why I’m out here.”

The familiar feel of earth under my hands assaulted me so quickly that I physically felt it in my solar plexus. Wind rushed out of my lungs and tears stung my eyes. I dug my fingers deeper into the near frozen ground, breaking my long nails and getting dirt under the quicks, so that I felt sharp, burning sensations from the sensitive flesh. Dazed I lifted my head slowly to the sky. Nothing focused at first and everything was a haze of color – soon the ringing in my ears stopped and my eyes settled on a bright red star that didn’t twinkle, so it wasn’t a star at all.

Longing overwhelmed me again with strength ten times worse than it used to as I stared at the red planet. I could feel the something feral inside me pounding against my heart and inside my skull, begging to bind in the ways I’ve always been taught. “Please,” it cried. “Please, please.”

I heard my own voice saying these things, could feel myself grasping to that feral energy and making it mine. I couldn’t take my eyes off that planet as I felt the energy careen from my body and offshoot in a direction I couldn’t name. But it was focusing and pulling at me and I followed it in blind desperation.

Then I was in two places. I was still in the field, staring at the red planet but I was also being consumed by fire, even though I felt no heat. I could hear ravens cawing but I could also hear the soft chanting of a female voice in the distance. Curiosity and need propelled me from the fire towards that voice and from the fire sprang a pair of startled, violet eyes. 

The eyes turned to a face and the face turned into the body of a young Japanese miko, who couldn’t have been older than fourteen. When I looked upon her as I was also looking upon the red planet in the sky, I suddenly felt her heartbeat. It called to me and so I came forward, desperate, shaking, and full of a need that was awakened in my spirit by years of traditions and teachings that could not be fulfilled.

When my hands touched her face, I let tendrils of that feral energy reach inside her to bind with her heartbeat. I heard the distant sound of a girl screaming but I brushed it aside. I needed to reach that heartbeat. Soon the earth beneath my hands turned to red sand and the sky turned gray and bright. I realized that the heartbeat was coming from the planet beneath me and that somehow the miko girl was a doorway to it.

I was flooded with immeasurable happiness and joy as I poured more of my bottled, unrequited energy into the planet beneath me. The planet responded, resonated. A heart was finally beating with mine.

Suddenly I felt myself being torn away. Angry and frantic, I fought it, but the sheer power behind the force overwhelmed me too quickly. I was thrown back into the fire. I saw the miko kneeling before the fire, one hand on the floor and one grasping her chest. She was rasping for breath, but she still looked angry and fierce enough to make my weakened spirit cower.

“Smother me, will you...” she said. “Evil spirit, begone!”

The power behind those words hit me hard and sent me hurtling whatever part of me that was not in the field back to my body. It threw me off the ground so that I landed hard on my back several feet from where I was kneeling. Groaning I tried to sit, tried to shake the muffled feeling from me mind. In the back of my thoughts, I noticed the grass around where I was kneeling was charred for a considerable radius but that did not register as significant until later.

“I’m not evil,” I muttered in childlike injury. Tentatively I reached for the earth again and tried to channel into it.

Nothing happened. Just a muffled feeling in my head that I couldn’t get past.

Had I been cut off?

“No!” I said aloud and tried again. But something was blocking me. What was blocking me? Did that girl...? How could she? Why would she? 

Tears streamed down my face as I tried over and over again to reach inside and open the channels of power all people had. I pounded the earth and screamed. This couldn’t be happening to me right when I had found the Mother planet that I was searching to desperately for.

“An it harm none, do what ye will.”

Grandmother’s voice again. Whispering in the back of my thoughts.

It hit me that perhaps it was a bit selfish of me to use the girl like that. Ashamed, I thought of what my power might have been doing to her mind as I channeled it into her without reservation. I was being stupid. I lost myself and I was told never, ever, lose yourself to power. We are the protectors of life. We are the children. And though I was left confused, I could not forget; if ever I should find myself able and reaching out to this miko again, maybe she could help me in the way I've been needing all these years.

If only.


End file.
